CHIMP Robot: Move Like A Tank, Act Like A Primate

A few months back, DARPA announced their Robotics Challenge, and what you see here is definitely one of the contenders, with the CHIMP robot built by the team over at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center. CHIMP stands for CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, and it comes with tank-like treads on its arms and legs that helps it traverse across bumpy terrain, while sporting legged motion capability so that it can stand up when necessary. Sort of like a Transformers-inspired creation, this.

This is definitely an unusual approach where locomotion is concerned, and it should allow the CHIMP robot to get around whatever obstacles it faces. We do hope that give it a decade or two, we will soon see flying robots that are far more autonomous than what we have today, helping out the military in ways that were once imagined and dismissed as fantasy. The CHIMP is one of the cooler designs out so far, and we cannot wait to see what other designs are thought up for the rest of the Robotics Challenge.